Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

fermi-game.andrewnoble.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–39 of 39 posts

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#31

Post by mNovak »

andrewrn wrote: post #13
mNovak wrote: post #6

It looks very nice visually, but I think the input sliders are way too narrow. Point in fact, in this example they have roughly a 2:1 range, which means virtually any combination of inputs 'wins' the game (is within 1 order of magnitude). That's not particularly fun, is it. Personally, I approach Fermi estimates as order of magnitude guesses for each factor (e.g. if guessing how many ping pong balls fit in a 747, you…

This is revealing an important design distinction. The game needs to adapt to different scales. There are huge scale estimations (day 3's question is the volume of air humanity inhales each day, for ex), and smaller ones that are still useful "how many cups of coffee can a barista make in a hour". Both seem like they could still be fun, with the mechanics being more dynamic to the question's scale. Do this seem right…

A few other points on further reflection:

- If you're giving us all the factors, and all factors are necessary (e.g. to make units work out), then clicking them is a bit of a pointless activity. You could just give them as a list of sliders outright.

- The above points out that there's not much of a "gameplay loop" to speak of. We make 3-4 guesses and game over. I think this places a hard cap on how much "fun" Fermi can be. Even in something like Wordle, which is also only 5 guesses, each guess builds on feedback from the last; it's interactive and strategic.

- You could consider for instance maybe chaining multiple Fermi estimates, that build up to some bigger one. That would give you a mechanism to give intermediate feedback, and have a multi-step game.

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#32

Post by andrewrn »

crmi wrote: post #20

I like the concept. However the UI is a little confusing (on mobile anyway). I might suggest you don't present the pre-set range values, as it makes it a lot easier. Have you considered - perhaps in a way to gamify it a bit more - giving a first hint, and hiding the next 3 unless the player asks for them? It would add an element of 'getting it in 1 go' etc. I'd imagine one or two-shot winners are also more likely to…

The # of hints is an awesome suggestion, thanks so much.

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#33

Post by andrewrn »

iterance wrote: post #22

I am not sure I entirely understand the game. In typical Fermi questions, the goal is to arrive at the appropriate order of magnitude. In this game, the order of magnitude appears to be provided for you. The extrema are ~220k and ~1.8M for the question regarding passengers in the air, and these extrema are less than an order of magnitude apart. Am I misunderstanding something...?

Yeah I arguably shouldn't have associated it with Fermi questions yet, because you're right, its a lot more arbitrary than the clean selection of orders of magnitude. Thanks

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#34

Post by andrewrn »

hallh wrote: post #19

The idea has potential, but needs polishing. When I read the tutorial, I thought that I had to guess the target number using completely unrelated values. Was a bit disappointed to see the "options" were obvious and not really optional, and the scales too limited. Seemed too easy. It would be more entertaining to guess the number of people currently in flight based on x number of full football stadiums, the avg number…

Thanks for the visual queue idea!

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#35

Post by andrewrn »

whiterook6 wrote: post #26

I'm on my phone, trying this. It's a question about how many people are in the air right now. - when I tap on a factor, I can edit the slider, but it doesn't do anything. - when I tap another factor, the previous editor stays in place. - how do I choose my factor? - where do I actually do the multiplication? - where do I check my answer? - why do the factors have "grab icons" (the six dots)? Why would I drag one? htt…

Thanks for the feedback. I am totally new to making apps for phones and I clearly failed to test sufficiently. I also didn't know how to serve a react app on my local network so I could test on my phone before deployment...lol. Lessons majorly learned. I pushed fixes so now it should work on mobile.

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#36

Post by andrewrn »

_diyar wrote: post #17

Neat idea, reminds me of this clip[1] from a Twitch streamer guessing the Costco price of sliced cheese. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKoYrpFn-Ls

This is a really relevant clip to this project, thanks for sharing it with me.

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#37

Post by andrewrn »

mncharity wrote: post #27

If I were doing something vaguely similar, I might emphasize: - Bounds rather than point estimates. Hard bounds (definitely more/less than this) and soft bounds (likely). With associated payoffs/penalties. A point estimate too, but bounds first. Like error bars in a plot. Perhaps even "bet your certainty" custom hardness. Perhaps an advanced "draw your payoff curve", so one might draw a hard step-function low bound w…

Wow, thanks for the very thoughtful feedback. You're right I think bounds makes more sense. And I also like the bets idea where perhaps the user has a budget of bound softness they can use on the factors that they're least confident about. These would definitely make a richer, more gamified experience. I'd like to add all these elements, but the challenge will be packaging it all intelligibly into the UX, which is struggling even on this initial basic mvp version.

The idea originated because I thought it would be really cool to get good at making these quick estimates, for practical usage in everyday life. So I'm trying to strike a balance between a really rich, complex game, and a little tool to just build mathematical thinking habit and ability.

Your mention of team-based estimation where people use one another to whittle down estimates reminds me of this competition I came across while researching: https://estimathon.com/about. It's very related to this project. Social features, starting with something simple like "you guessed closer than x% of people!" are something that I want to add but I hadn't thought of an almost team-based gameplay like you suggest. Definitely intriguing...

Thanks so much!

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#38

Post by andrewrn »

mNovak wrote: post #31
andrewrn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is revealing an important design distinction. The game needs to adapt to different scales. There are huge scale estimations (day 3's question is the volume of air humanity inhales each day, for ex), and smaller ones that are still useful "how many cups of coffee can a barista make in a hour". Both seem like they could still be fun, with the mechanics being more dynamic to the question's scale. Do this seem right…

A few other points on further reflection: - If you're giving us all the factors, and all factors are necessary (e.g. to make units work out), then clicking them is a bit of a pointless activity. You could just give them as a list of sliders outright. - The above points out that there's not much of a "gameplay loop" to speak of. We make 3-4 guesses and game over. I think this places a hard cap on how much "fun" Fermi…

Incredibly helpful point about the iterative aspect. A softer benefit of the chaining idea you have is that you could build an amusing narrative like pizzas eaten annually in the U.S. -> gallons of milk used -> cows dedicated just to pizza production. And if a user was ~30% low on one stage, they'd know to overestimate slightly on the next. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Fermi – A Wordle-style game for order-of-magnitude thinking

#39

Post by andrewrn »

mrngm wrote: post #23

A few thoughts, I tried this on mobile but got a bit confused by the initial "How to play" dialog (besides that it was too large to fit on screen). The dialog says: How to play. String together factors to answer the question. ... but the dialog doesn't pose a question! It just shows two factors with sliders, and the calculated answer, but no reason why we're sliding these two elements from left to right. I would skip…

Thank you SO much! The configurable easy/medium/hard windowing is such a damn good idea! It's immediately intuitive to me and is way less arbitrary and more pure than what I've got going on now.

I'm replying a little late so I'm not sure you'll see this, but I do wonder about dropping the clicking of factors. Others have pointed out that since multiplication is commutative its mathematically meaningless to click factors. But to me, when I make these estimations on paper, determining factors in a certain order in my head is critical to get the dimensional "path" to the answer units, so to speak. Having the chain pre-made for the user would take some fun out for me, I think. I could be alone on that though. I'll have to think about this a bit.

I guess as I am writing this its giving me clarity... when done on paper, factor ordering/pathing serves (me, at least) as a proxy for getting the correct set of factors, even if their order is mathematically irrelevant. So there's got to be a way to implement this in the game. I made this project bc I want to get good at this kind of estimation in a practical sense, so it seems like matching the on-paper thinking structure might make be good?

On another note, I am a little horrified at how much stuff slipped by me on this mvp, like that bad domain in the copy+paste text. Thanks for pointing it out :|

Thanks again!

Post reply on HN